A quote I picked up in reading/listening to Medhi Hasan’s new book Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking via my Audible account (Great stuff!)

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

Joseph Joubert

and from John Stuart Mill’s treatise On Liberty…

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

―

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6 Books That Explain How the GOP Went Crazy

Not long ago, another magazine asked me to recommend six books that explain something important about American politics. I chose six of my favorites that help elucidate the most important development of the last half-century in American politics: the Republican Party’s embrace of movement conservative ideology.

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Candide was Right

In Candide, the famous parody of Enlightenment intellectuals, Voltaire gave us the line that “we must cultivate our garden.” It comes near the end of the work, when it becomes obvious that the moral lesson of Candide’s tutor, Dr. Pangloss, namely that “we live in the best of all possible worlds,” is in all likelihood incorrect.

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“The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters”

…on this BIG HUGE PROBLEM our country has. I.e. if we don’t like the advice and expertise of experts on a subject we can ignore or even DENY IT. I’m now preordered.

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[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Ms. Senior’s review…

Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming

His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting. Hope was part of its core philosophy.

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“In “The Undoing Project,” Mr. Lewis has found the granddaddy of all stories about counterintuition, because Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky did some of the most definitive research about just how majestically, fantastically unreliable our intuition can be. The biases they identified that distort our decision-making are now so well known — like our outsize aversion to loss, for instance — that we take them for granted. Together, you can safely say, these two men made possible the field of behavioral economics, which is predicated on the notion that humans do not always behave rationally.” — Jennifer senior

It comes out Dec 6th and I be starting it that day…

(P.S. to all my Greeley friends while I do not know her personally this review was written by Jennifer Senior a Horace Greeley High School grad and Chappaqua resident and a very good writer and speaker in her own right)

Review: Michael Lewis on Two Well Matched (but Finally Mismatched) Men

To be fair, Mr. Lewis is very aware of his quaint enthusiasms – as when he tells readers to skip ahead if they don’t care to read his footnote on Page 259, which consists almost entirely of algebraic equations. “I apologize for this,” he writes, “but it must be done.”

Are You Of Two Minds? Michael Lewis’ New Book Explores How We Make Decisions

A Friendship That Changed Our Minds Hardcover, 362 pages | We like to think our brains can make rational decisions – but maybe they can’t. The way risks are presented can change the way we respond, says best-selling author Michael Lewis.

Reading Michael Lewis’s New Book Made Me More Worried About Donald Trump

I was hoping that Michael Lewis’s new book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, would offer up a bit of post-election escapism. In the book, which is published by W.W. Norton & Company and came out today, Lewis tells the story of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists whose friendship and collaboration changed the way we look at human behavior forever.

Michael Lewis’s ‘Brilliant’ New Book About Cognitive Bias

News Corp is a network of leading companies in the worlds of diversified media, news, education, and information services. ‘The Undoing Project,’ focuses on the lifelong collaboration of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli-American psychologists who are our age’s apostles of doubt about human reason.

From Michael Lewis, the Story of Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About the Way We Think

The research of Kahneman and Tversky has become some of the most influential social science of the past century. It has helped to reorder economics by exposing the folly of economists’ belief in an unconsciously rational human mind. The work has also led to advances in medical diagnosis and patient behavior.

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This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century

Amazon.com: This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (9781568587332): Mark Engler, Paul Engler: Books

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‘Dark Money,’ by Jane Mayer

A staff writer for The New Yorker, ­Mayer spent five years working on “Dark Money,” which originated with an article on the Koch family she published in the magazine in 2010. Neither Charles nor David Koch agreed to talk to her, and several of the most important figures in their political network were unavailable.

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The Timeless Lessons we can Learn From Atticus Finch – Personal Growth

What made Atticus so admired. He was trustworthy, principled, strong, courageous, fair, loyal and humble. And Finch was perceptive when it came to what we’d call “group social dynamics” - he forgives the individual members of the mob that show up to hurt Tom Robinson, a man he’s defending, simply because he understands that mob psychology is capable of overwhelming otherwise good people.

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What Books Would You Recommend Someone Read to Improve their General Knowledge of the World?

Inspired by a reader’s question to me, I thought I’d ask our followers on Facebook and Twitter for an answer to the question: What books would you recommend someone read to improve their general knowledge of the world. I must say the number and quality of the responses overwhelmed me.

I’ve read a bunch of them, but there is still a number of titles I’ll have to tackle. I’ve already read 19 or 20 of them, some so long ago they would probbly be worth re-reading again and there are two from the list I recently purchased and have started or will start soon enough. The books I’ve read…

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Slaughterhouse Five
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• The Prince
• The Art of War: The Essential Translation of the Classic Book of Life
• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• The Denial of Death
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
• Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
  In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives―and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.
• The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• How To Lie With Statistics
• 1984
• Godel, Esher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life

My own personal additions to a  Recommend Reading To Improve Your General Knowledge of the World? book list

• Man’s Search For Meaning
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• and I’m thinking of others to add…

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A ‘Memory Hacker’ Explains How to Plant False Memories in People’s Minds

We tend to think of memories as perfect little time capsules-important records of past events that matter to us and made us who we are, as unchangeable as a dragonfly stuck in amber. Well, they’re anything but. I recently met with Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist who specializes in the science of memory.

The article is a good one and it piqued my curiosity enough that I decided to (pre)order the book. The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory.

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XYZ you do realize that science is a method of investigation not a belief system. Do you have a better more reliable method I should use in its place to figure out how the physical world works? What is it?

The problem I have with your pejorative use of “scientism” is that despite your carefully cloaked assumption that religion and perhaps other disciplines have methods of apprehending truth beyond science you do not give a single example of a question that those other disciplines have answered that science can’t.

Again scientists don’t “believe in scinece“. Science is a method of investigation.

Dr, Jerry A. Coyne on Science and Faith…

Why Scientists Have No Faith in Science

A common tactic of those who claim that science and religion are compatible is to argue that science, like religion, rests on faith: faith in the accuracy of what we observe, in the laws of nature, or in the value of reason.

There’s a simple story book I love that I read years ago that has a great moment and a great accompanying line in it. The book is Richard Back’s Illusions The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. It’s a story about two barnstormers that meet up flying around the country performing small private air shows and develop an interesting teacher student relationship. One of them, a character named Don Shimoda is the teacher, and he has this small little book with him called “The Messiah’s Handbook” which whenever you open it seems to have the answer you were looking for. Something tragic happens and the teacher and the book falls to the ground and the student character who is the author Richard Back picks up the book looking for the answer to explain what just happened and he reads:

“Everything in this book might be wrong”

Indeed everything we discover and think we know,…may be wrong.

I am not a scientist. I don’t study and explore biology, agriculture, climate, or physics first hand. I rely on other scientists to do that for me and then I try to understand what they have done and what they have found as best as I can. I am always willing to change my mind and change what can be called my positions when I learn something new I haven’t known before. If “following” scientists who know science and the scientific method better than I do, and eschewing supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embracing empiricism and reason makes me a member of the supposed church of scientism well then so be it.

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The Lowdown on GMOs: According to Science

Fourat Janabi (Smashwords)-Free e-book

This free e-book a collection of essays got me started. One of the authors, Michael Simpson, I was already very familiar with reading his SkepticalRaptor.com blog.

Pandora’s Picnic Basket: The Potential and Hazards of Genetically Modified Foods

by Alan McHughen

Interestingly enough I would also see and get to read Dr. McHughen’s comments in the Food Farm Discussion Lab on FaceBook.

Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food

by Pamela C. Ronald & R. W. Adamchak

Food and You: A Guide To Modern Agricultural Biotechnology

by American Council on Science and Health  Martina Newell-McGloughlin, D.Sc.; Bruce Chassy, Ph.D.; & Gregory Conko, J.D.

The Man Who Fed the World

by Leon Hesser (Author)

Thank to a post by Channa Prakash of AgBioWorld  in the Food and Farm Discussion Lab Forum on FaceBook I learned of a new book coming out on Norman Borlaug and William Vogt entitled

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World

by Charles C. Mann

The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

by Jayson Lusk

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives — Michael Specter

Doesn’t really mention biotech & agriculture at all but I mention it here because it explains just how damaging and dangerous science denial can be.

The post Some of the Books I’ve Been Reading to Educate Myself On BioTech & Agriculture appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

"If Congress goes along with the so called solutions the insurance industry says it is bringing to the table, and acquiesces to the demands it is making of lawmakers and if it fails to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to the President might as well be called “The Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act."

Well that is the bill we got. We certainly didn’t get a public insurance option to help keep the private insurance companies in line.

So just who is this guy Wendell Potter? Is he/was he just a disgruntled mid-level insurance company employee? Was he just some liberal hack being brought in to bolster the liberal "Obama-care" agenda? No it turns out Wendell Potter was at one time Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, which is one of the United States’ largest health insurance companies. As Vice President of "corporate communications" it was Potters job to design build and articulate the message propaganda that CIGNA and the health insurance industry wanted the American populace to hear about health care.

So what happened to Wendell Potter that would change his mind so that he would say something like that in testimony before congress? According a July 27th 2009 article in The Guardian entitled: Whistleblower tells of America’s hidden nightmare for its sick poor Potter was visiting a free health care clinic being run by Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps a, non-profit, volunteer, airborne medical relief corps operating in the mid-south region of the United States and…

"What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements."

Within a year of that life changing experience Potter had quit his position with CIGNA and became a whistleblower with a goal of revealing the distorted message that the health care/insurance industry was feeding the county.

Wendell Potter has written a book, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. In it readers can learn how the health care/insurance industry just like the tobacco industry before it carefully crafted a deceiving propaganda campaign to shape and manipulate American public opinion.

Potter tells us how he actually ‘ helped formulate the rhetoric of socialism and death panels that thundered from Republican podiums’ these past few years and helped to form ‘fake grass-roots organizations‘ and ‘bogus scientific studies’ to support and bolster the health care/insurance industry’s profit-at-all-cost position (at our cost I might add).

You can read an excerpt from Deadly Spin, The Beginning and a sample chapter from Deadly Spin here: Chapter 2 The Campaign Against Sicko

Congress did very much fail in their obligation to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers and yesterday a Republican controlled house even voted to repeal what few reforms we were able to achieve.

It will be very interesting to see just what the Republican controlled house is going to design and offer as legislation that will be a "better" alternative to what few real health care reforms we did get.

Some notes and further reading:

• Transcript of Wendell Potter’s Senate Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation June 24, 2009
• CNN Politics.com — Commentary: How insurance firms drive debate
• The Guardian: Whistleblower tells of America’s hidden nightmare for its sick poor
• A Speech From the Heart…”Bound To Be True”
• Ex-Cigna Exec Wendell Potter: ‘I Don’t Think Co-ops Have A Chance To Succeed Or Compete’

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